Reflections and notes on the relationship of art to nature and of nature to art from along Warwoman Creek, in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Katuah Province of Turtle Island, where the light, the dark, the seasons, the time of deep past, deep present and deep future all mix in alchemal mists to reveal and hide and transform these slopes, shaded coves, bright rivers, deep forests and me, and together sustain me and my art.

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Honor and I have come to show and tell you messages from our mountain community. Both Honor and I agree with the naturalist John Muir that “going to the mountains is coming home”

The paintings your see around you of Honor’s and the poems I’m going to tell you are all about that coming home. It’s not easy, coming home:

*

WE ARE ALL

We are all vagabonds
on this earth, wanderers
with hungry hearts

looking for a home
we never had.

At night we gather
to distant fires
of scavenged wood and brush

stir the ashes there
and seek answers in the stars.

In ceremony
we mark our faces
with our dream of want -

flames and crosses and circles.

And we carry this into all our days
even into the desert of our lives

dreaming into each new country
our home again.

- Laurence, 9/09

Paintings and poems share something important -
a concentrated form of paying attention.
Paying attention to what is!
And what is is both moving and still
Paintings are still and yet move in our minds, our thoughts and feelings.
Poems are always moving in our minds, and thoughts and feelings
and yet form pooling echoes of the still and eternal present.
Paintings and poems - two sides of the same coin

As Honor puts it:

“we come together
in the middle
your shade of green and mine
not sure which way is up
at times your green is on top
sometimes mine is the sky
sometimes the red is river
others a hilltop
ablaze in the late sun
still others, a river of blood
that takes a bit of you and a bit
of me with it to the ocean.
sometimes, though, it is
a beautiful, shining light, that
draws us both near.”

Poems and paintings are grown not made
No hammer or nail will oblige.
What’s needed is water and silence
seeing and listening
moving to a time as slow as roots.

WHAT’S NEEDED?

What’s needed
is water
and dark

moving to a time
as slow as roots

in a well

where slivered fish
swim

in a dream
of knowing

not caught
but foreseen.

SEEING, CREATING
- to be read to my students in drawing class

Seeing, creating,
it is an endless quest
for it is going nowhere in space or time
but only deeper into the presence.
There is grace in this.

It is the grace of knowing
that our consciousness and the light
are always arriving in the world
together.
Hello!

SPIRIT SALSA
- for Lynn

Come and dance
you and me
come and go

around and back
and come again
all the patterns flying

there is no you
there is no I

and we two are
but a fold in time.

Come!

and dance between
all the patterns making
and unmaking

you and me now

step again
with me now
into this always

changing
moving
desiring

and then just there
and then
where it calls us back

into the circle
where letting go
is holding on

to where
the meaning always is
moving on
to a desire

that brings to life
and the dance between

you and me
always making
come and go.

My love!
Come and dance with me!

We are sorely in need of these messages that art can show and tell us.
The glaciers are melting and the seas are rising... and there’s not much time.

LISTEN!

Listen!
Will the world be still
after we depart?
Will there be cold? Will there be sweetness?
Will the birds still talk about
what we never learned to hear?

Or will it all be forgotten, or forgiven,
or will it just be still?

Listen!
Our children are coming and we are going.
It’s late, but listen!
If we fail to listen
and then to tell them,

the rivers and the mountains
will stop breathing in
their fullness. They’ll stop whispering
their care and advice, and there will be nothing

for our children to hear
but their nightmares.

As social anthropologist Mircea Eliade once noted “Properly speaking, there is no longer any world, there are only fragments of a shattered universe.” (The Sacred and the Profane, p.23-24)

We artists say NO! we won’t live like this. And so we seek to remember the wholeness of this world, to recall for us all what Thoreau and John Muir said “This IS the first morning of Creation.”

Any one who has seen the Hawaii volcano Kilauea spilling molten lava into the sea (or seen a film of it) can have no doubt that creation is today and this morning, just as it is up behind my house where Green Gap Branch issues out from under a rock just below the Bartram Trail.

Jonathan Bate in his book The Song of the Earth (2000) exploring the role of poetry in our changing concepts of nature writes “As the solidity of things is replaced by the evanescence of commodities, so the poets [and artists] must stand in for the ancient Roman “lares”, those everyday gods who guarded hearth and home. On another level, as the realm of nature - the wilderness, the forest, that which is untouched by the human, the Being that is not set upon - has diminished almost to vanishing - point with the march of modernity, of technology and consumerism, so a refuge for nature, for the letting-be of Being, must be found in poetry [and art]” (The Song of the Earth (2000) ( p.264”

But it’s hard to stand on a mountain side in Rabun County and believe that anything is coming apart, or is made of fragments.

FINGER WEAVINGS
- a poem to be read by two voices

(male voice): (female voice):

in afternoon lightI walked in late winter woodsall stripped to boneI stopped to sit and smokeand sort the jigsawed piecesof a splintered lifethe mountain’s flank swathed in an amber caul of lightin the quiet I thought I feltsomething being offeredstitching at a wound of light and dark, pulling at the threads of the living and the dead.I thought to say thank youto something being givenknitting through leaf litter, bark and sky, a land of gatherings in this quiet.In this quiet it’s dangerous giving voice to wishas a sailing hawk far off calls then catches and lifts on the winda word said can’t ever be taken back insidejointing, feathering, fitting flesh to air, air to fleshbeware what you wish, for it could have consequencesthe horizon is already mountain saying sky, the sky already saying mountaininstead I cast a pinch of tobaccoeverything else is already offering this to that and that to this

(now both voices together):

in the simple speech of respect

we are sewn together. we are sewn together.

These mountains are daily wrapped in mystery and fact:
the light, the dark, the round of seasons,
the time of deep past, deep present, deep future -

these all speak to us,
the mists alternately hiding and revealing
the steep slopes, the shaded coves, the bright rivers,
our lives and our work.

BREACHING

I wake
from submarine dreams
and breach the morning
in the blue lake light
of dawn.

Afloat on my back
I watch the sun come up
and turn the whole room
to peach

the sweetness drawing
from one world to the next.

DAWN

Dawn,
with lighted fingers
stitches a delicate thread
an amber line of ridge against the night

- then begins
to hem
the greening march of trees
down along the still dark creek

- and begins
to mend
out of what might have been
this day together

- once again
such prescient
marvelous
needlework!

- surely sewn
we together
out of wonder
this world.

ON A DAY, STILL

On a day still
as sleeping cats, among
a stand of pines, one cracks
near its base and falls
against another.

No fault
of weather or storm,
just a failing within -
a fissure running six feet up
and all the tissue there
collapsing like a knee blown out.

In a moment
drawn out so long
it too is stilled,
the broken one leans
against another

as if it stumbled
in some crowd going to a game

and the others
not taking notice, but
kindly accept to offer
a shoulder to a stranger.

One against another,
no one speaking -
sometimes it’s all we’ve got,
each of the other.

Six months later,
coming down the trail
this moment is still here

and now, lifted out of a spring
as a handful of water
is lifted out of time.

OH, SNOW!

Oh, snow! clean
like forgetting, fresh
like remembering.

WINTER SPRINGS

Winter
springs, silent
seepages,

from cracks
in great mountains,
weepings

from some far
away ocean
of time.

SPLITTING

a chunk of wood
on the chopping block

three wedges sledge gloves
all that’s wanted

a steep swing then
steel on steel
a bell rings

then thwack
and the timber opens
like a book

within grey covers
the scent of summer last
yellow

and a sweet secret
revealed to me

the tree long gone
the breath in it

still here
all that’s needed

OUR BREATHS EACH TIME

Our breaths each time
reach out and come back.

They must so love the world
they always go back
for more.

Or perhaps I’ve gotten this
all wrong. This breath’s
not ours at all, but the world’s.

The world’s searching deep
into our opened chest
and then pulling back
for more.

This tide,
in its gravity of care
is drawing us on forever.

These days the glaciers are melting and the seas are rising, and the animals and plants are going. But along the steep escarpment of the Blue Ridge Mountains springs squeeze out of rock, flush into clattering branches, knot together strand by strand from the strength of these mountains. Nevertheless, these mountains are ravaged, scarred and wounded, not by that, but by us. First it was the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Ani-Yunwiya,"the principle people" the Cherokee. Then it was the lumbering. Then it was lumbering's aftermath - the floods that flushed away essential topsoil. Now it's real estate.

WILL YOU BE THE ONE?for Honor and Robinette

Will you be the one
to leave a sign in the ground
for those who come after to find
that we too lived

and loved, cried and died,
fighting with ourselves and each other
to the end of us

and that one of the least of us
left this coin.

WHAT THEY WANTED

The teacher asked them
to draw what they wanted.

The commissioner's son drew streets,
paved and straight and bright.

The developer's son drew signs
covering the hillsides with crisp dollar bills.

The lakehouse owner's son drew mansions
in a shimmering necklace around the lake.

The environmentalist's son drew a river
bobbing with kayaks and laughter.

The carpenter's son drew houses,
board upon board, high enough to reach the sun.

Driving home, eastward
out of the seething traffic,
out to the bitter end of it,

out past the houses
where indigent souls feed on bread
coming up through tar and stones,

Out past the farms and fields
where cedar on wasted ground
accedes to groves of poplar.

out where the road rises
to loaves of hills leavening in the sun
and the eye lifts to the blue of mountains.

Up slope then into a forest of oak and hickory,
the daylight broken and splintered
and dancing with shadows.

Up to ridge top, ragged and scoured,
slipping over its divide unseen and
unregretted, to rejoin ourselves

down the farther shadowed folded thigh of this
into the sweetening breath of hemlock,
into the tumbling chatter of Becky Branch,

turn after turn unwinding,
shedding my skin of what we’ve known
down between the saltiness of rock, the sourness of root,

into a darkening cleft
secret as being.
Just going to earth, just going home.

Eastward then, out into the valley,
brightening, breached and unfolding,
- just a little farther

beyond what we’ve known and owned,
just beyond the border,
home to what we’ll become:

nothing more than root, salt, earth,
a breath given up to wind,
nothing less than always yearning eastward.

WE ARE ALWAYS DREAMING

We are always dreaming,
the good life, the bad life,
the life not lived.

In our ceremonies
we mark our bodies
with the signs of our dreams:
flames and crosses and circles.

Wearing our dream marks
we carry our whole lives
into the country of our days.

We must do this - keep it up,
this dreaming into our waking country,
keep it going, keep it safe,
even into the desert of our selves.

THIS WAY, THIS STONE

This way I’m shaping
this stone small
as a bird’s egg makes

in the palm of my hand
a nest for what an eye sees
and can imagine

the smooth and rough of it
this way against that
of what might be

a shape gathered up
just here drawing out
and dying just there

the feel between the grain
of all such things as stones
and hands and dreams.

The rough self
the smooth self
the still self

the unknown self
drops like an egg
into a well of wonder.

LESSON #1: HOW TO LISTEN TO A BIRD SING

Take off all
your clothed and
clammy thoughts.

Sit awhile.

Make nothing up
between the intervals of silence,
but listen to them.

Between each breath
is a song you’ve forgotten,
is always calling us
to gather to this wild
and shocking world.

This music happens to us
before we can ever think about it

this song happens in us
before we can ever say it’s impossible

to listen before we speak
of nothing or everything.

LAST THOUGHTS ON TESTIMONY
“Rühman, das ists!” - Rilke

After the catechisms,
after all the acolyte years,
after hearing the preacher scream on the radio:
“...from the Thank-God-Almighty-
Atlanta Highway-Church of Redemption,”
I think God wants only singing.

She wants only that there be singing!

It doesn’t matter who does it.
If I don’t, some one else will.
For God only wants
there to be singing.

About Me

I live in a secluded cove in the Blue Ridge Mountains of NE Georgia, along Warwoman Creek - about a 9 mile hike West from the Chattooga River. To the north of my studio, the Blue Ridge Mountains rise in deep cerulean blues. I live here because these mountains sustain me and my art - light, dark, the seasons, the time of deep past, deep present and deep future, all mix here in alchemal mists that alternately reveal and hide and transform these steep slopes, shaded coves, bright rivers, and deep forests -just as they do my life and work.

July 19, 2014, Poetry reading at Spelman College, Atlanta, Georgia Poetry Society. Received an annual award from the Society - '2nd Place Award for Excellence' for my poem "In My Body" to be published in their 2014 anthology 'The Reach of Song.'

Sept 29, 2012, Performance of "Let us Gather at This River" with Marie Dunkle on fiddle. Vogel State Park, Ga. Georgia Forest Watch Fall Retreat.May 5, 2012, Home Grown Market, Clayton Ga. 10 a.m. New Poem: "An Invocation for the Opening of the Rabun County Home Growers Market" with original improvised fiddle music by Marie Dunkle.

May 5, 2012 at the North Georgia Community Center, Ellijay, Ga. Laurence will perform his long poem "Let Us Gather at This River," with original music by violinist Marie Dunkle, as part of the Ga. Forest Watch Wild & Woolly Art & Nature Music Festival.

January 19, 2012 7 pm. at the Mountain Heritage Center at Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, N.C. Laurence will perform his long poem “Let Us Gather at This River” with original music by Marie Dunkle at Gary Carden’s “The Liars Bench” a monthly presentation showcasing Southern Appalachian culture in all its richness and diversity.

November 26, 2011"Poetry Hike to the Chattooga River." Original poems along the way by Laurence Holden & original music by fiddler Marie Dunkle, sponsored by Georgia Forest Watch.October 24, 2011 - Debut of my new poem "Let Us Gather at This River" - a long poem with original music by cellist Marie Dunkle at Poets Live, preview event for the 2011 Georgia Literary Festival, Sautee-Nacoochee Center, Sautee, GeorgiaApril 23, 2011, "Sing Me the Creation: Poems for the Earth, Poems for Coming Home," Poetry presentation with music by Julie Longhill and Tom Devan, Promenade of the Arts, Mountain City, Georgia.November 26, 2010: "A River of Words & Images," multi-media presentation in collaboration with artist/poet Honor Woodard, Crescent Moon Bakery, Clayton Ga.

October 18 - 21, 2010: Artist-in-Residence, Westminster Schools, Atlanta. Talks & conversations about poetry and painting, our sense of place in nature and guided explorations of writing in nature with students at Westminster Schools, Atlanta.

October 15, 2010, Poetry reading at Sycamore Place Gallery, Decatur, Ga. in collaboration with artist and writer Honor Woodard.

September 22, 2010'Within Reach of a River: Paintings & Poems 2001-2010. Westminster Schools, AtlantaAugust 15, 2010. "Poetry on the Mountaintop." A hike up Rabun Bald in North Georgia, with poetry reading along the way. Sponsored by Georgia Forest Watch.

July 31, 2010: Georgia Poetry Society, Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, Ga. Received an annual award from the Society - '2nd Award for Excellence' for poem 'What's Needed,' to be published in their anthology 'The Reach of Song.'

July 17th, 2010, 2 pm. "Forest Walk with Poetry" at the Hambidge Center, Rabun Gap, Georgia. A walk through the forest with readings from my poems and others (including Mary Hambidge) about the creative powers in nature that are evoked by this special creative sanctuary that is the Hambidge Center.June 30th, 2010 - "Water Walk with Poetry," at the Hambidge Center, Rabun Gap, Ga. sponsored by Globe Gallery, including an experience of writing and performing a group poem.